Dream Towns...and Our Town

I can't get enough of these Best Places To Live, and Best Neighborhoods magazine features.  In fact, there used to be a time when I checked the racks for these issues every month, knowing full well that Outside, or Men's Journal, had just published the issue, and it would be eleven or twelve months before they would do it again.  I remember laying on the floor in a rented room in the Canadian freshwater dive mecca of Tobermory, ON, waiting for June to come home from work, and burning the hours leafing through a Best Places to Live issue, sighing out loud.

Dreaming of running away isn't just a youthful pursuit.  Even now, all aged and established (supposedly), I still can't help but root through the pages of these issues and imagine little Zed growing up in one of these fantastic places.  More often than not we're blindsided with a listing of a place that we know intimately...Leucadia and Encinitas, CA...Carroll Gardens or Cobble Hill, Brooklyn...and we're rewarded with a sort of geographical vanguard feeling of been there, done that.  It's uplifting when you've decided to call home a place that's a mere 45 minutes from where you grew up.  No regrets, we walk to the beach, and can be sitting in a stadium with 100,000 friends back in Ann Arbor in just over an hour, but Sarnia, Ontario is NOT San Clemente, CA.  Mind you, our neighborhood also doesn't cost us 106% more to live in than the rest of North America.  Still, it's nice to dream, and even nicer to discover that someone else's dreams have also been your reality.  And there's the biggest benefit of where we've chosen to lay down roots.  We can afford to have a little of both...Cobble Hill and Carroll Garden, and an affordable home near the beach.  No one writes magazine articles about that.

My perfect town?

Vibrant, alive neighborhoods...

Lots of families...

An economy that is operating on any level above collapsing...

Some culture, some entertainment...

Close to water...beach smells preferred...

A healthy, active vibe...

Schools and education are important...

A far left pacifism kind of attitude...

Drenched in a collegiate residue...

Sunshine...

Bookstores and at least a couple of record shops...

I can walk, or drive...or bike...or paddle...

I can wear whatever clothes I like...cotton Dockers and golf shirts aren't the standard maniform...

There are friends close by...or people I'd call to call friends...

Close to some kind of transportation hub...I wanna get places, and without hassle...

I understand the vibe...you can take the boy out of the midwest but not the midwest out of the boy...

I can spend my money there...

People are happy.

When you look at it that way...geography only accounts for some of it.  We...our attitudes, our perspectives, our ambitions...make up the rest.  Dream towns don't always show up on your GPS.